


return

by faenova



Series: a guardian without a charge [1]
Category: The Last Guardian (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Illustrations, Magical Tattoos, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2020-02-10 06:58:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18655288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faenova/pseuds/faenova
Summary: It was only a few days, but the changes will affect him for a lifetime.or; what happens after the boy comes home.





	1. wake up

**Author's Note:**

> so, i played through the game twice and basically cried through it both times
> 
> this gets really heavyhanded on worldbuilding cause i made a whole culture for the boy's people from little things we get in all the ico games. theres also some ocs, because i needed to fill a whole village for the boy to interact with
> 
> also, trico is female because uhhh i say so. i need monster mom content

wake up,

 

~ 

 

The first thing he sees is Trico out of the corner of his vision. The rest is obscured by the dirt that his face is half-pressed into. She roars at something--the other tricos? He remembers there being more. He remembers...

His body lights up with pain as she nudges him forward. Away. He can't manage any noise, just gasping as he tries to breathe through the pain in his chest. Why is she pushing him away? The pain doesn't stop, and he's suddenly lifted up. It doesn't feel like Trico pulling him up by his scruff. But it's not the cold arms of the knights either. He cracks open an eye to see he's surrounded by people. _Humans_. He can barely recognize their blurred faces, nor their voices as they're suddenly drowned out by Trico roaring, crying out like she's being attacked.

No, _no_. "Trico--" he chokes on his own words. He can't let them fight her, she's not bad. He can't let anyone get hurt, Trico is already hurt. "Trico," he tries again. He lifts his arm, pain spiking from his fingers to his chest. It falls, once, and he lifts it again to try and signal her. She stops roaring. He has her attention. He swallows his fear and pain to point, say, "Go," and hope she understands that he means go far, far away from here. Go somewhere _safe_.

The villagers (Acano villagers? His family?) are shouting. Trico growls, low and threatening, and he aches. "Come on," he tries to coax her with his hoarse voice. He prays she can hear him over their commotion. But she always heard him before, hadn't she? She never let his cries go unanswered. She can't ignore him now. She needs to be safe. " _Go_ ," he gasps. His arm shakes, and he can't hold it up any longer.

He hears her bound forward, and feels the rush of wind as she jumps overhead. He tries to open his eyes, to see her take flight, but she's already too far away for him to make out. Trico calls out in the distance, low and mournful. The same noise she makes when she can't find him. He wants to call back and reassure her that he's here, he's fine. But he can barely even keep his eyes open now.

The villagers say something, but he can't tell if they're talking to him or not. There's a ringing in his ears that's getting louder as his body continues to throb. His head hurts and his skin is burning.

Then everything goes dark.

~

He wakes with a start to more pain.

When he opens his eyes he can actually see, there's no haziness to get around. He's in the healing house, his grandmother's home, but that's all he sees before he shuts his eyes tight against the pain. He can identify the worst points of it--his leg, chest, and head. His skin is tingling, but no longer on fire from the foreign magic pressing into him and causing his markings to burn. He opens his eyes and tries to sit up but is rewarded with more pain.

There's a weathered hand gently resting on his chest before he can even cry out. "Shh, Aji. It's alright." His grandmother is sitting next to his sleeping mat, holding a bowl full of something foul-smelling in her free hand. She smiles at him reassuringly, but her bright eyes are crinkled with worry. "Don't get up. You're safe."

"Ma... Enta..." Aji coughs, pain spiking through his chest. He wheezes, trying to breathe shallowly.

"You twisted your ankle, but nothing is broken," Mama Enta says softly as she runs her hand through his hair. Right. He fell, dragging Trico's severed tail to the... thing. He remembers limping to the caged floating ball, but he doesn't remember it hurting. "Your ribs are bruised, but at least your fever broke. The Trico did quite a bit of damage."

"Not... Trico," he says weakly. "She didn't hurt me."

"Of course," she says without missing a beat. That's the wrong reaction. No one should believe him when he says she's harmless. They were just aiming spears at her if his hazy memory is correct...

But she's gone now.

Tears well up in his eyes at the thought. He hiccups, tries to bite back on his sob because the tightness hurts his chest. His grandmother strokes his hair as he tries so hard not to cry, reassuring him that he's safe and it's all over.

Aji doesn't want it to be over, he wants Trico back. He wants to stop hurting. He wants to know what happened, if he really was able to stop that _thing_  from controlling the other tricos.

His grandmother leaning down to embrace him doesn't stop the pain like Trico's purring does, but it at least clears up his thoughts as he sobs into her shoulder.

After a while he's scrubbing away tears and is about to ask where his papa is, when she suddenly says "Macata," in a stern tone. "Aji's awake, come over here."

His papa steps into the room, trailed by his little sister hiding behind his legs. "Aji!" she cries.

"Dimi," Papa Macata warns. "Be gentle. Aji's been hurt."

She nods rapidly, zipping to Enta and purposefully not coming any closer to Aji. Papa Macata kneels next to his mat, looking like he's seen a ghost. Aji's still sniffling, breath hitching as it pulls against his sore ribs. "I'm back," he says quietly. "I'm back," he repeats, like he can't even believe it.

"Welcome back," Macata echoes. He's never seen his papa so relieved. He strokes Aji's face gently, wiping away tears that are immediately replaced by new ones. "I'm so glad you're safe."

Aji nods and keeps his mouth shut. If he says anything, he'll cry harder. Everything was so much, so fast. Somehow it feels more real, more terrifying, now that he's back home. He wants to tell his family everything, but he doesn't even know where to begin. He just squeezes his eyes shut and leans into his papa's touch. He falls asleep like that, with his papa and grandmother's hands comforting him.

~

He wakes up again, to sharp pains through his head. It feels like there are sparks behind his eyes, and he can almost see the lights dance across his vision. He tries to blink the illusions away, willing whatever magic is still in his skin to disappear. When he looks around the room, he finds Dimi is sleeping next to him. She's wrapped up in a blanket and half hanging off his sleeping mat. No, not asleep. She's peeking out at him, her face barely visible. "Are you awake?" she whispers.

"No," Aji says. His chest doesn't hurt as much anymore, but talking still takes effort. "I'm sleeping with my eyes open."

Dimi giggles and crawls out from under her blanket nest. "Good, cause Mama Enta said I'm not allowed to wake you up."

He tries to smile at her, but he's sure all he can manage is a tired expression. "It's okay. I was just about to go back to sleep."

"Already?"

"M'tired," he mumbles.

"Will you tell me about your tattoos?"

"Later," he promises. "After I sleep."

~

He doesn't wake up to pain this time, but rather to the smell of food. Dimi is nowhere in sight, and his best friend is sitting down next to him. "Nice to see you awake," he greets. "Papa Macata said I couldn't see you, but Mama Enta set him straight. And she sent me with this. Here," he offers Aji a bowl of something, but then seems to realize that Aji is still lying flat on the floor. "Can you sit up?"

"I think so," Aji says. He struggles for a moment, and his friend quickly sets down the bowl and helps him gain his balance. His chest aches from the movement, but there's no burning pain. No burning anywhere, even. He's abruptly cut off from his thoughts as Cosu throws himself at Aji to hug him. "Ow." So much for his chest being pain-free. He blows some of Cosu's shaggy hair away from his face. "Hi, Cosu."

"Hi?" Cosu laughs, pulling back from Aji. "You got eaten by Trico and then spit back out and all you have to say is _hi?"_

__

"Trico isn't bad. She saved me."

"It ate you!" Cosu nearly shouts. He's always been the first to defend Aji's antics, but Aji admits that this is quite a bit harder to come to terms with than his usual nonsense.

"But eating me wasn't her fault! She was being controlled!" He quickly explains. "It wasn't her fault," he says again, quieter. He picks up the bowl of soup that Cosu set on the ground.

"Aji." Cosu locks eyes with his best friend and says very slowly, "You sound crazy."

"The rest of the story is crazier," he says, dejected. He slowly starts to eat the soup. Normally, the food Enta makes to help people heal would make his nose wrinkle. But after scrounging for food in the trico's nest for days, it's the best meal he's ever tasted. "I don't know if anyone will believe me."

"Try telling me first." Cosu shovels his own food into his mouth (flatbread and vegetables, it makes Aji's mouth water but he forces himself to ignore that thought and sticks to his own soup) and keeps talking as he chews. "If I don't believe you, then you'll know the rest of the village won't, and you can start coming up with a lie."

"I'm not gonna lie!"

"Hasn't stopped you before."

"This is different," Aji insists. "As soon as my leg is better I need to look for Trico. They probably won't let me look by myself."

"Hah? You want to go and _find_  that beast?" Cosu squints. "The adults said it looked almost dead, it won't be coming back."

Aji tenses up and his stomach twists into an uncomfortable knot. "Trico is tough. She's gotta be okay." She's bounced back from worse, he wants to say. But he didn't even see the extent of the damage. He doesn't actually know how hurt she is. The other tricos all ganged up on her. And she only got better so quickly before because he would feed her... barrels.

The knot in his stomach suddenly turns to churning and he gags. Aji's hands quickly cover his mouth, dropping the bowl and spilling it everywhere as it clatters to the wooden floor.

Before he knows it, Cosu is gone and Mama Enta is rubbing circles in his back as he dry heaves over the little amount of food he already threw up on the floor. He hears her mutter something about leaving him alone with Cosu, then, "Well you obviously didn't eat too much or too fast. How do you feel?"

He feels like he wants to cry. "I'm okay," he lies. "I'm--" his head hurts again. Aji squeezes his eyes shut, willing it to go away. There are no more knights, he tells himself. He isn't in danger. And yet...

"It's alright. You rest for now, and you can try eating again later."

~

Aji hates that he's been so tired since he woke up. He hates that he isn't allowed to move around, too. But right now what he hates most is that he's woken up in the middle of the night with a headache that burns all the way down his spine, and no one else is awake. Mama Enta is sleeping on the other side of the room in her bed, but there's nothing she can do. Can she? Mama Enta has magic, she has to because she's the healer chief, but it's not magic like this. Bright shapes cloud his eyes and it feels like when the knights would try to take him, but nothing is happening. Nothing except his head hurting and his skin burning.

He hisses, bringing his hands up to rub his eyes. It helps briefly, until the lights come back with a vengeance and pain spikes through his head.

He jolts upright, trying to escape--escape what? He can't escape, there's _nothing there!_  

He wants to scream he wants to hit something he wants to curl up against Trico while she purrs he wants everything to _stop_.

He balls his hands up in a fist and slams it against his sleeping mat. The thump reverberates theough the floor to his leg and he winces, but when he looks down...

His hands are glowing.

The marks are lit up, all around his body.

Why? _Why?_

He still doesn't understand. The kids taken were... they were turned into the knights, he's sure of it. He knows their remains were turned into... barrels. He doesn't know how to explain it, it's just a feeling. The kids that went into the statue had the same energy as the knights. But now he can still feel that energy buzzing under his skin. It shouldn't be there, right? Nothing should be making this happen.

Panic continues to creep up his throat, slowly suffocating him. It hurts. He wants it to go away, stop hurting. _Go away, please_ , he begs. 

The magic hums louder, threatening to burn him.

 _Go_ _away!_

Everything explodes.


	2. explode

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything explodes.  
> He doesn't know how else to describe it.

wake up,

explode.

 

~

 

Everything explodes.

He doesn't know how else to describe it.

One minute his skin is glowing, and the next thing he knows the magic jumps out of his body and there are lights, runes, everywhere. His skin is still lit up and he feels a faint tingling. Aji reaches out tentatively, brushing over one of the runes hovering near his face. It spins, shimmering in the air for a moment, then pulses brighter. He somehow knows that it originates from the left side of his chest. He doesn't know how, or understand why. But if he looks at each one, he knows he could trace it's origin point on his body.

He feels... something else, too. Like if he pulls at the rune somehow, he could just...

Mama Enta shouts his name. He startles, looks at her quickly and then back to the lights that freeze in place and explode again, outward, physically crashing into the walls, floor, ceiling--something shatters and Mama Enta grabs and shields him as the roaring of the magic clatters and crashes around the room.

And then it stops.

Mama Enta lets go of him slowly. Aji can't see the damage, because she grabs his shoulders and looks directly at him. "Are you alright?"

He nods. His skin is still buzzing, but it's been like that since he first woke up with Trico in the bottom of the cave. Now, there's no more burning. His head doesn't even hurt anymore. He tries to look around, to see what it was that he heard breaking, but Mama Enta tugs his face back to look at her.

"Do you know what that was?" she asks sternly.

Aji starts to nod again, slowly, but then stops himself. "I... kind of?" Mama Enta releases her grip on his face, and he can finally look at the room. All the dried herbs and tools on the shelves are tipped over, and several heavier jars are in pieces, the contents scattered on the floor. The small stack of books is tipped over, along with the extra sleeping mats and blankets. Most noticeably, the shutter has been blown right off the window. "...Did I do that?"

"I don't know, did you?" she asks, raising an eyebrow. "I've not seen magic like this before."

Oh.

Right.

She keeps staring at him, like she's looking for an answer that Aji doesn't have. She finally drops her intense gaze and sighs. "Do you think it will happen again tonight?"

"No," he says quickly. "No, it's all gone." Well, not _gone_ -gone. He's still buzzing just underneath his skin. But it's as close to gone as it's ever been. Possibly as gone as it ever _will_  be, unless he finds a way to remove his tattoos. He isn't sure how he feels about that.

She nods, as serious as she always is. Aji hopes she knows that he won't play tricks with something this dangerous, even though the rest of the village always thinks he's messing around. "If you're sure, then I want you to go back to sleep. And you'll tell me everything in the morning, yes?"

"Yes."

"And after that, maybe you can go outside for a little while. But only if I see your ankle is getting better. And I'll have Cosu or Macata keep an eye on you so you don't overdo it."

"I'll be careful!"

"It's just in case." She stands back up, and walks back to her own sleeping mat, mumbling about having to clean up this mess in the morning. She stops at the window, glaring at it like it's personally offended her. Then she turns around. "Aji, you're sleeping with me tonight. Scoot over, I'll pull our sleeping mats together."

Aji looks up at her, then at the window. Mama Enta still looks like the open square in the wall did her some kind of wrong. When Aji does not readily move, she nudges him to do so. She packs up his bedding to drag it to the other side of the room. She puts his mat near the wall, putting herself between him and the window. 

He sleeps easier tucked against her chest.

~

He wakes up to a scream.

No, a roar.

 _Trico_.

He bolts out of bed and runs. Through the building, past the fields, following the sound as far as his feet will carry him. She obviously can't find him, so he has to find her.

Aji's body stutters to a halt somewhere in the forest, nowhere he recognizes. He brushes past the trees with tingling hands, the foliage turning to dark feathers under his fingers. He looks up.

Trico croons at him. It's distorted and distant in his ears, but he still recognizes the call. _There you are_ , mixed with lower tones of _Worry_. Aji buries his face in her feathers, and her low crooning turns to happy trills as she bends down to brush her cheek against his body--something Aji has learned to recognize as a hug.

She's hurt, but not as badly as he thought. Her tail is half gone and her face is battered, one of her eyes swollen and bruised. Blood cakes her feathers and wings, but her wings thankfully don't look broken. Her front leg might be, though. "It's okay," he soothes, sweeping his hands over her feathers. It feels like he's touching air, like he could just melt and disappear into a cloud of fluff. "It's okay." Everything _does_  disappear except for Trico, and then... there is no more Trico. But she's still here, he can feel her. He can feel where she's hurt. He can see her--see through her?

He's seeing through Trico's eyes.

Just like...

Aji gasps awake.

He feels heavy and tired, but nothing hurts. He blinks away the blurriness and looks around, finding that it's long past sunrise and that the room is completely put back together, but Mama Enta is gone. She must be up and tending to her plants.

Aji shifts his leg. No pain. He brings his knee up and rolls his ankle. Still fine. He cautiously stands, slowly putting weight on his leg. Not even a twinge. Walking reveals no hidden pain either, so he makes his way to the window.

The hinges are completely torn off, but there's no other sign that the window was forcibly removed. Leaning out of the window reveals small shards of wood scattered around the bushes that he can grab if he bends down far enough. No huge chunks, but those were probably already picked up.

He grips the edge of the window sill and hauls himself up, and then pauses when he realizes that his fingers don't have any cuts or scrapes around his fingers. Just last night, his hands were torn up and felt jagged when he touched anything. Now he has rough callouses and faint scars, like it wasn't just a few days ago that he was clinging by his fingertips for dear life on an hourly basis.

Aji decides to add that to the list of weird things to ask Mama Enta about and finishes jumping down from the window.

Just like he thought, Mama Enta is im the garden around the side. But before he can greet her, she suddenly stands up straight and shouts "Aji! Your ankle!"

"No--it's fine, it doesn't hurt!" Aji defends, but she's already storming over to him. Before he knows it, she's swept him up and then forces him to sit down, looking over his leg with a careful eye. "I woke up and it was fine," he explains weakly. "Look--my hands are better too."

She inspects both. "There's no signs of swelling," she mumbles. "You're right. It _is_  healed." But she doesn't sound happy about it. Or at least, she's suspicious about it. That makes sense. "Well, fine. Have you eaten?"

Aji shakes his head.

"Then let's get you food. And I want you to tell me what happened."

~

After they get food from the house and return to the garden, he tells Mama Enta what he's been able to piece together: that there's more than one trico, and they were being controlled by the glowing ball of magic that lived in their nest. They ate children and changed them somehow, before spitting them back out as sacrifices for their master. Aji didn't finish changing, or else he would have suffered the same as the other children, being turned into formless armored knights which seemed to exist to take care of the master, and the rest of his body put into barrels.

"Why did Trico spare you, if she was being controlled?" Mama Enta asks.

"She got hurt. Her wings were broken, and--her horns!" he exclaims. "They always lit up when she was being controlled. But they were broken too. She must have broken her horns and spit me out."

"And that is when you became friends with the beast?"

"She didn't want to eat me. We helped each other escape... she saved me lots of times. Even hunted for me, when I couldn't find enough food."

Mama Enta hums in response, like she's considering his story.

"I'm not lying."

"I know you're not," she answers. "But sometimes our perceptions are warped. I'm just thinking about all the possibilities."

"She brought me back," Aji reminds her.

"That she did. I'm grateful for it, but many in the village are only going to see that she took you away."

"It wasn't _her_ ," he insists.

"I know. But you need to understand, Aji. We thought you were dead to us forever. They won't be able to forgive as easily as you." She cups his face in her hand. "You're a wonderful boy, Aji. You're a forgiving soul, and that's a good thing most of the time. But it makes us worried."

"Mhh."

"I'll talk with the elders about this. But before then, I have another thing to ask. Your magic."

Aji grows still again, glancing nervously at the still runes on his arms. "I... used it against the knights, sometimes," he says carefully. "I was scared. I don't really know how I did it, but I know it won't do anything right now."

"Were you scared last night?"

"What?"

"Last night," Mama Enta repeats. "Were you scared when you used the magic?"

He has to think. He was feeling a lot of things last night, but right before everything happened... "Yes." His mouth feels dry. His skin is buzzing just thinking about it, and he tries to shove the feeling back down.

She hums. "Are you okay? Do you think it will happen again?"

"No," he lies. "It shouldn't--I mean. If I'm not in danger I'll be fine, I think."

He can already tell she doesn't believe him. But the important thing is that she tells him, "I'll let you go for now. Go ahead and run around, tell everyone you're back. I'll speak to the village chief about what happened to you. But in the meantime..." she puts both her hands on his shoulders. "Don't tell anyone what's happened to you yet, alright? I want to figure everything out first so no one gets the wrong idea."

That's fair, he thinks. He's never been the best at relaying events. Words escape him most of the time, and he gets distracted and forgets things easily. The elders will likely question him tonight, unlike Mama Enta who patiently listened to his jumbled story without interrupting.

Mama Enta pats his shoulder and releases him. "Get to it. I know you want to run."

He doesn't need to be told again. When he turns around he nearly tries to climb up Mama Enta's hut before he remembers that he doesn't actually need to do that. He can go around. No need to scramble over every obstacle in his path. There are open fields and roads and clear paths around the buildings. Mama Enta doesn't comment on his hesitation, or when he turns to look at her for some kind of reassurance. He only gets it in the form of a hard stare, an unsaid,  _Well? Go on_. And he does just that.

It feels good to run, even if he wasn't bedridden for very long. Aji didn't actually ask how long he was out, but it doesn't seem important. Not when he runs to the village square, happily yelling that he's back, he's okay. He quickly gathers attention from the kids, and the adults follow soon after.

He talks and he gets real words in return. The hands that touch him aren't cold and made of stone. Adults chastise children for asking too many questions: if he's okay, what happened, what do the tattoos mean... he can barely start one sentence before he's on another one.

In the end, it doesn't matter. The familiar warmth of his village, his family, is tangible in the air. He's welcomed back with open arms. That's all he needs right now.


	3. it's okay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy shit the responses ive gotten are?? really great?? i love you guys and im real glad you like this fic

wake up,

explode.

it's okay,

 

~

 

Aji being back and fully recovered throws the rhythm of the village off for the day. The kids are allowed to shirk their chores, and even the adults ignore duties for a while. One of their own has returned from the dead, after all. It's cause for celebration.

His sister finds him while he's sitting on top of a roof and watching his friends and family bustle around the village square in preparation for a feast. Dimi immediately starts asking about his markings before his feet hit the ground. He tries to explain that he can't tell her yet, but nothing is quite as stubborn as a six year old who's been made a promise. Papa Macata has to abandon chopping wood to talk her down, but she still sniffles and says, "But Aji _promised_ ," one last time as Papa Batu approaches with Cosu by his side.

"Chief Batu," Papa Macata greets him with a nod.

Papa Batu nods back, and turns to Aji. "Should you be running around?"

"Mama Enta said I'm fine--so I can go back with you and Cosu soon, right? Is Mama Hido here? I need to catch up, I must have missed a lot!"

"You didn't miss that much, honestly." He ruffles Aji's hair. "Hido is helping out another village, so you don't need to worry about your normal apprentice duties. Things will return to normal soon, and you can attend Cosu's lessons tomorrow if Enta clears you. But why don't you and Cosu have fun before we have the fire tonight?"

Well Aji certainly won't say no to that. Papa Batu leaves Cosu with Aji, who doesn't leave his side. He immediately puts himself between Aji and anyone who gets too pressing with their questions. Aji tries to tell Cosu that he can tell them "not yet" just as easily, but Cosu insists.

Cosu soon pulls Aji away from the village square and into the border of trees around the village, and it takes Aji a moment to realize that Cosu probably still thinks that he's hurt. Mama Enta or Papa Batu must have told him to keep a close eye on Aji. "I don't need a break. Mama Enta really did say I'm better."

"Are you sure?" Cosu looks him over, disbelieving. "You look tired."

Aji rolls his eyes. "Yeah, but I'm not hurt anymore. I'm all healed up."

Cosu doesn't have Mama Enta's eyes, so he can't look over his healed wounds and declare him better. But that doesn't stop him from trying. "Are you  _sure?_ " He repeats as he pokes Aji's chest gently. "That doesn't hurt?"

"Very sure. It doesn't hurt at all."

"Hm." Cosu sits down against a tree. "I guess you don't need me watching you then, huh?"

"Not really." He sits down next to his friend, scooting back against the same tree. "But thanks anyway."

Aji observes the edge of the village. They're sitting behind the carpenter's shed, where the crafters usually are busy. It's mostly empty now, but he waves back at an auntie who spots him and it almost seems normal if not for the awestruck look in her eyes, like she can't believe he's actually here.

"So what did happen to you?" Cosu suddenly asks. He doesn't make eye contact, only stares in the same vague direction Aji was a moment ago.

"A lot." Aji opens his mouth, but reconsiders what he was about to say. "Mama Enta said I should wait to talk about it."

Cosu's gaze shifts to the ground. "Even to me?"

"She said everyone. I think she wants me to talk to the elders first."

"Oh."

"I'll tell you soon. I mean, I've already told you some of it."

"What, that the Trico was controlled by someone else? Not like that even tells me anything. I just have more questions."

"It's complicated," Aji defends. "You were right though, it all did sound crazy. I don't even know if _I_  believed it when I told Mama Enta everything."

"...Is it that bad?" Cosu finally looks up.

"No." He isn't sure if he believes himself. Again. He scoots closer to his friend. "Well. It was a lot."

"It _was_ a lot," Cosu echoes. "For us too, I mean." He offers his hand, and Aji takes it and leans in so they're pressed together, shoulder to shoulder. "We thought you were dead." Aji's heard it a lot since he's woken up. Dead. Gone. Left. It makes him feel guilty, somehow, even if it wasn't his fault. "No one's ever come back once they've been chosen."

Chosen. Right. His skin hums a bit louder, and he looks down at Cosu's hand. He doesn't seem to notice, which seems impossible with how his skin feels like it's vibrating off of his bones. He blinks and looks up, finding Cosu looking at him like he's waiting for something. Aji doesn't know what to say.

Cosu seems to realize that Aji isn't going to say anything, and continues. "What was it like, where you went? Can you tell me that?"

He probably can. No one is around, it's just them and the trees. Cosu can keep a secret. "Do you remember when Mama Hido took us to see the ruined temple?" Cosu nods. "Imagine that, but... more. Lots of ruins, and they're all taller than a hundred trees stacked on top of each other. In some places I couldn't see the ground. It was just mist or darkness."

"Wow."

"Yeah. It was really cool, when it wasn't falling apart." Aji wants to let the quiet last for a while, but he he can't stay still. He's buzzing again, he needs to move. He squeezes Cosu's hand and stands up before asking, "Want to explore?"

"Aren't you tired?"

"I've been stuck in Mama Enta's house long enough."

Cosu looks like he want to retaliate. He usually argues with Aji about running around in the forest, but he just gives a short laugh. "I guess it wouldn't be normal if you weren't getting into trouble."

"I'm not getting into trouble!" Aji offers Cosu his hand. "Maybe a little. But you'll keep me out of it, right?"

Cosu snorts and takes Aji's hand. Aji pulls him up--maybe a little bit too hard, since he pulls Cosu right into him and they both crash to the ground. It earns a laugh from both of them. "Sorry, I thought you were heavier than that."

"Rude." Cosu hits his shoulder gently and gets up on his own this time. Aji follows him quickly and takes the lead into the forest. "Do you know where you're going?"

"Maybe to the river." Not actually that far, he doesn't want anyone to worry too much. He just doesn't know what else to do with himself right now. "Are you coming?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm coming."

~

Kicking around in the shallow parts of the river doesn't help to clear his head. It doesn't help dull the buzzing either, which is slowly turning from background noise into a much more irritating sensation. He doesn't know how to convey this to Cosu when he asks what's wrong, but he tries. "The markings are uncomfortable."

"Oh. Well, tattoos are supposed to hurt for a while, right? Did Mama Enta give you something for it?"

He opens his mouth to explain that it isn't that kind of hurt, but what comes out instead is, "I'll ask when we get back. It doesn't hurt, it's just annoying."

Cosu grabs a stick to poke the water, looking like he doesn't believe a word of it. He really does know Aji too well. "You probably shouldn't go all the way into the water, it might make it worse."

"I won't." He doesn't want to wait for his clothes to dry off, and he doesn't want to take them off either. He knows the markings are everywhere, but he isn't ready to see it yet. He looks into the trees where the orange light is glaring through the leaves. "Is it getting dark already?"

"Soon. You did wake up late."

"And you're not telling me we need to go back yet?"

"You're having fun," Cosu shrugs.

"So I get special permission to stay out late because I almost died, is that it?"

Cosu shifts uncomfortably. "...We _should_ probably go back soon though, they'll start the fire once it's dark."

"Ha!" Aji shuffles out of the river and shakes the water off his feet. "There it is."

"I'm being serious."

"I know you are. That's why I'm getting out of the water." He wipes his feet on the grass and gestures to them dramatically. "So let's go back."

The buzzing doesn't disappear as they walk back, either. It sets his teeth on edge, like something's about to go wrong. But he's safe, right? He's fine. It's okay.

 _It's okay, it's okay_.

No returning purr.

He hugs his arms to his chest as they approach the village. It's not dark yet, but everyone is already gathering in preparation for what could pass as a festival, considering the food that's being brought out. All because he's back. No one's ever come back before. No one will after him, either. No one will be chosen. No one even knows yet.

"...cold?"

Aji suddenly jerks his head up. "What?"

"Are you cold?" Cosu repeats. "Maybe we shouldn't have gone to the river."

Oh. He uncrosses his arms. "I'm fine. All dry."

"It looked like--"

"My markings itch. I'll go ask Mama Enta for ointment, like you said."

Aji starts running before Cosu can argue with him, and loses Cosu somewhere along the way.

For a brief moment he looks for Mama Hido, before he remembers she's not here. She's the traveling chief after all, and she wouldn't have waited for him if she thought he was dead. He remembers they were planning to go help a neighboring village that had lost... he thinks they lost their village chief, and their traveling chief was too far off to get back quick enough to help or had settled in a different village, he doesn't remember anymore. Aji had been looking forward to helping her with work outside Acano village for the first time, but it's okay. There's always next time.

 _It's okay, it's okay_.

No feathers between his fingers, no whining or chirruping, no big black eyes looking at him...

Aji feels vaguely hungry, when the smell of food snaps him out of his thoughts.

_Are you hungry?_

Then again, he also feels like he might throw up again. Maybe he really should go find Mama Enta.

All he manages to find is a visiting traveling chief (Not Mama Hido) speaking with an elder. When he tries to turn around and continue looking, he's whisked away by the elder and passed off to several more adults. It's getting dark and they're starting the fire, no time to be running off now. Cosu is nowhere to be found, neither are Papa Batu or Mama Enta, or his papa and sister. He's given flatbread and roasted meat he doesn't eat and is pushed towards the fire that seems much too bright, and too many people talk to him at once.

It somehow feels like so much more than when he was being talked to earlier today. The buzzing grows louder and it's hard to hear what everyone says over each other, even those who aren't talking to him. Everyone keeps touching him, leaving heavy weights down to his bones even after their hands (not stone, safe, human) leave his skin.

Aji's whole body is vibrating again. He clenches his teeth so hard his jaw hurts, and he focuses on the fire that burns his eyes. Buzzing, no purring, and the fire is roaring louder than people's voices now. He isn't sure if they're talking to him, but hands still touch him (it buzzes, it burns) and seem to linger longer with each touch.

The markings start to spark in the corner of Aji's vision. He wills it to stop. He isn't in any danger, and he hasn't woken up from a nightmare, and he isn't in any pain. There's no reason for this to happen again. He told Mama Enta it wouldn't happen again.

He keeps his hands planted in his lap and stares harder at the fire. Voices blur into the fire and the buzzing, and the touches stop eventually or else he's stopped noticing. Either is fine.

There's something wet on the back of his hand.

It's glowing blue.

Another droplet falls onto his hand.

From his face?

Aji reaches up and brushes his fingers against his lip, where his nose is... dripping?

It's dripping a glowing blue something.

He still feels as if he's vibrating right out of his body as he licks his lip.

It tastes like blood.

His nose is bleeding.

His blood is glowing.

The fire explodes.

There's screaming--none of it is Aji's, his throat is dry and he's frozen in place and far too close to the too-big fire, but his markings jump off of his skin and block the flames from burning him completely.

It's hard to see, his vision is filled with the bright lights of the runes and the fire behind it. But his ears are filled with screaming and _they_  don't have strange magic to block the fire that's swallowed him whole at this point, and who knows how far it's spread across the village square.

They don't have magic, but he does. He did this. He can stop it.

Aji reaches up, and the runes dance across his fingertips, cycling through every mark on his body to find what he needs. He has to stop the fire. Put it out. Blow it out. Blow? No. There isn't anything for that. Think simpler. Move the air. Tell it to go. He did it before, he can do it again.

 _Go away_.

The roaring fire is immediately replaced by roaring wind. It crashes through his bubble of runes and forces Aji to his knees as it sweeps the fires away into nothing, and it takes all his effort to yell at the winds to "Stop!" which does nothing until he conjures up what he can only assume in his foggy brain is the corresponding marking.

It's silent. The runes snap back to his body and his nose is still bleeding into a glowing puddle on the ground. 

He can feel the rest of his village staring, but he can't see them through the bright blue haze in his eyes. He can't see if their mouths are moving, and he can't hear anything over the ringing in his ears.

Something grabs him, and everything gets louder for a split second before he realizes the arms are human. The knights haven't grabbed him. It's only Mama Enta. It's okay. He's safe.

_It's okay, it's okay._

So why can't he convince himself that it's true?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It will get explored a little more thoroughly later in the fic, but each village has a council of elders (like maybe 3/5ish people, some of which may be retired chiefs) and 3 active "chiefs", all with different duties around the village.
> 
> VILLAGE CHIEF = in charge of internal affairs. never leaves the village.  
> TRAVELING CHIEF = in charge of affairs with other villages. the village chief's second in command. *but* they split their time in their hometown and in sister villages, trading information, ferrying important items and people, and will step into the role of village chief in the event of the village chief kicking it.  
> HEALER CHIEF = in charge of affairs to do with spirits and magic. basically a shaman. spiritual and physical healer, removed from the majority of the village.


	4. young god

wake up,

explode.

it's okay,

young god.

 

~

 

Aji's vision doesn't go back to normal until after Mama Enta whisks him away to the great hall, the closest building in the village square. As the blue tint in the world fades, everything goes back to a normal level of bright flames and dark shadows dancing across the walls of the vast meeting room.

His ears are still ringing, so he's not sure if she says anything to him as she cleans the blood that's still dripping from his nose to his chin. When she pulls away the cloth, it's stained red. No more glowing blood.

"Is everyone okay?" His voice comes out raspy and quiet. His throat hurts, but then so does everything else.

Mama Enta seems surprised that he's spoken at all. "No one was hurt. You were the only one who stayed close to the fire."

Something tight in Aji's gut unravels, but that just makes him aware of the fact that he's still on edge for a hundred other reasons. A hundred and one, when the door to the great hall suddenly slams and the elders storm in, Uncle Batoro at the forefront. Papa Batu and the traveling chief from the village he didn't catch are last through the door, and it's deliberately closed behind them so no one else will follow.

"What happened?" Uncle Batoro addresses Mama Enta, not Aji. His voice is strong and even, but everyone else is looking directly at Aji with a mix of expressions that he isn't entirely comfortable with.

"Calm yourself, Batoro. Aji didn't do anything on purpose."

"But it _was_ him. What hap--"

"I'm sorry," Aji blurts out. "I didn't mean to."

Uncle Batoro finally looks at Aji, his expression softening. But there's something else in his eyes that Aji doesn't know how to identify yet. "Can you tell us what happened?"

Aji nods, and Mama Enta suggest he start from the beginning. He doesn't know how well he'll tell it all right now, but he tries.

Just like he thought, they have questions. They interrupt nearly every minute of his account. Mama Enta still doesn't offer any opinions or clarification, just like before. She only sits next to him, a looming wall ready to hide behind.

Why would you trust the trico? "She was friendly. She let me pet her and ride on her back." But surely, it couldn't have been that friendly... "She was! Trico helped me, and she always found me when I called for her. She fought other tricos to save me." There's another trico? "There were a lot of tricos." How many? "I don't know."

The children grow up to become these... knights? "No. They don't grow up, they're... Mama Enta said it must be that their souls are taken from their bodies, and trapped." 

Who was controlling the tricos? "I don't know what it was. A glowing ball of light." What happened to it? "I killed it." It was alive? "It felt like the knights, but... different." Okay, how did you 'kill' it? "With Trico's tail. It shoots lightning."

Was this the first time the magic has happened? "No." How long have you been able to use it? "I did it once before, in Mama Enta's house." Can you show us how you did it?

"...I don't know how," Aji says dejectedly. He holds out his arms, looking at the markings. They made so much sense in that split second when the fire was licking his skin, but now it all looks like gibberish again. "I was scared, and it just... happened."

It's not the answer they want to hear. It's not the answer Aji wants to give them, either.

Mama Enta takes over the conversation. "I think, unless we have more questions for Aji, we should let him sleep. It's late."

Is it? It feels like it only just got dark, but he doesn't know how long they've been in the torch-lit hall. Before he knows it, Mama Enta is escorting him back to--not to her hut at the edge of the village, but to the nursery where he and Cosu and the other kids sleep. "I need to go back and talk to the elders for a while," she explains. "I don't want you sleeping by yourself."

Aji tenses up and he can feel his skin buzzing again. "Are you sure they'll want me in there?"

"Everyone is asleep. I've already told a den mother that you'll be in here." When did she do that? Has he just not been paying attention? "We can wake up Cosu, if you want."

"No," he replies a little too quick. "No. It's fine."

She kisses his forehead. "I love you. Sleep well, alright?"

He nods. "I love you too."

Mama Enta closes the door. Aji looks at the dimly lit room to the other kids. Cosu, apprenticed to the village chief. Jyanko and Ayu, who are trying to become Mama Enta's apprentices. Daun, who Aji thinks is still mad because Mama Hido said she wasn't fit for the job and then picked him to be the traveling chief apprentice instead. Litupa, who's nearly old enough to leave the nursery and live with the tailor he's apprenticed to. Mibul, a carpenter's apprentice. Hitam, Mera, Esi, still being passed around by different adults as they figure out what they want to do with their life. They're all in their normal places to sleep. Aji's mat is empty. His mind is not.

Something surges up his spine when he approaches his old sleeping mat. He doesn't remember it entirely, but he has plenty of other memories of Trico eating him to fill in the blanks. He turns around to see the window that Trico must have come through--no, it's not the same window. It looks new. She probably broke the old window, shoving her head in here. It's barely big enough for her to fit.

He doesn't feel like he fits in the room either, right now.

Aji tries to lay down and sleep, he really does. But time doesn't seem real and unlike in Mama Enta's house, he doesn't feel better after his outburst. There are still too many people here.

Before he knows it, he's creeping over to the window and unlatching it. He won't be able to sleep, not while he's buzzing. And if something happens again, he'd rather be far away from everyone this time. He glances down. Jumping from this height, he could walk away unhurt if he rolled right. But then again, the wood provides far more surface to grip than the sheer stone walls of most of the Nest's buildings. No point in risking it--he doesn't need to, not anymore. He climbs out the window and tries to close it as much as he can before inching himself halfway down the wall, and then dropping to the dirt. 

But now what?

He could run around in the woods. Make himself tired, maybe get rid of the buzzing so he can fall asleep. But he doesn't want to go into the forest at night, even with his strange new magic at his side. He'd rather just go back to Mama Enta's house and sleep there, but she'll be angry that he went off on his own either way. And he doesn't think he wants to be completely alone, now that he gives it thought.

All he can really think about is what the elders are talking about with the chiefs. But he really shouldn't go to the great hall to eaves drop.

He goes to the great hall to eaves drop.

Sneaking around the village feels like nothing, compared to sneaking past sleeping knights. There's no fear; the worst that can happen to him is he gets sent to bed by an adult. And maybe he _should_  go back to bed, but he's already at the great hall. The building stands alone at the edge of town square, no buildings next to it and nearly swallowed up by the trees behind it. There are no windows on the first floor, to prevent people listening in on important meetings. But the upper floors... it's quick work to climb up a tree (easier, faster than he remembers, but he doesn't pay it any mind) and quietly judges the distance to an open window. It's too far for him to jump from any of the branches at this level, so he climbs higher.

Before, he never would have thought to jump that kind of distance. And certainly not from this high, but there's no hesitation as he gets as close as he can to the edge and leaps. His fingers catch the top of the window and he silently drops onto the windowsill.

Aji has to be careful about creaking floorboards, but it's easy. Everything seems too easy. He steps into the room--Not Papa Batu's room, or Mama Hido's. It's hard to tell in the dark, but he thinks it will be his and Cosu's room when they move out of the nursery. He doesn't stop and wonder though, he has a mission. Aji carefully opens the door and steps into the hall, makes his way down the stairs, and stops when he sees light dancing along the wall of the stairwell. He creeps slower now, listening carefully for the voices coming from the lit room. He stops just before the light would touch him, still well out of sight from the main room.

He sits, and focuses on the hushed whispers.

"We can't be certain of anything." One of the elders. Uncle Batoro. "But considering what we've seen and what Aji has told us, I feel safer making assumptions now and acting on them and being wrong later, rather than ignoring this until it's too late."

"And what exactly does "too late" entail?" Mama Enta. Aji can hear the scowl in her voice--she must not like what's going on.

"We don't know."

"Then how can you justify this treatment?"

"Can you give us another explanation?" Papa Batu. He isn't happy either, his voice is thick with impatience that Aji is familiar with after hours of him and Cosu being lectured by the village chief. They must have been arguing for a while. "Enta. You saw what Aji did. You're healer chief, you know magic better than any of us. Tell me that was anything other than divine."

What?

"I can tell you that it is not the work of demons," Mama Enta replies firmly.

"Any of us can tell that much." Another one of the elders. He doesn't know them well enough to tell who, but that doesn't matter. He tries to focus on what they're saying. "But only the demonic and divine have that kind of power."

Silence. It's uncomfortable, weighing on Aji with such intensity that he would have fallen if he wasn't already sitting. He can't see a single face, and he doesn't know if he wants to.

"He was chosen," Uncle Batoro breaks the quiet. "We must remember that. Our previous knowledge of the trico cannot be thrown away just because this new information has come to light. Now we know who-- _what_ chose him."

"It has to be the Master of the Valley."

"And according to Aji, he's killed it." Papa Batu says. "So, what does that make him?"

"It makes him a _child!_ " Mama Enta snaps.

"Youth does not negate divinity! And if he is a young god, then we cannot ignore that!"

A young god.

"Batu is right. He's already had two incidents of losing control of his power, one of them in public. Ignoring this would be insane."

That's what they think he is?

"I'm not proposing we ignore it."

Aji doesn't feel like a god.

"Then what exactly are you proposing, Enta?"

Aji doesn't feel like anything, right now.

"That we don't jump to conclusions."

Aji's not even buzzing.

"But something still needs to be done in the meantime."

Aji doesn't even notice his hands gripping the stairs until the wood cracks and splinters under his fingers.

"Then I will take him."

Aji releases his hands.

"Take him... permanently?"

"You can't be serious."

"I am." Mama Enta is loud. Or maybe Aji is just afraid of what she's going to say. "You say I've been too picky with the children and I need an apprentice, since Anase died. Aji obviously needs to learn to control his new power, god or not. And I can train him in other ways of magic too."

There are sighs and murmurs around the room, but Aji is holding his breath.

"Hido should be a part of this discussion. Aji is her apprentice, after all. We should wait for her to return."

"What is there to discuss?"

"Hido will have to choose a new apprentice and move on. Aji is hardly traveling chief material with these new... issues."

No.

"A shame, but you're right."

_No_.

"He's going to have to be moved out of the nursery as soon as possible, if we don't want him using..."

Aji doesn't hear the rest of it. He nearly trips on the stairs as he stands and makes his way back up the floors as fast as possible without making noise.

He doesn't stop at the open window, he doesn't even think. He only glances a moment at the trees before jumping out and catching himself on a branch below. He maneuvers down the trunk, skirts around the village square, traces his path back and before he knows it, he's at the nursery. 

It doesn't occur to him to take the door inside, he just finds the nearest purchase on the wall and makes his way back up to the window he originally climbed out of. He steps inside, latches the shutters, and... and now what. He still doesn't want to go to bed.

Aji sits down on his sleeping mat anyway. He's still not buzzing, just... numb. It's probably the closest to relaxed he'll get right now. He lays down. Keeps an eye on the little lamp in the center of the room, almost burned down to nothing at this point. He wonders how many hours it is till the sun rises, and keeps staring at the light.

It feels like he only blinks, and suddenly the lamp is out and light is filtering through the cracks in the window.

Getting up means he has to face whatever the elders decide for him. Means he has to move on, like they said Mama Hido would have to.

He stays still for a while longer and waits for the others to wake up first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> literally the only reason this update took so long is because it took me forever to sit down and just draw the hecking illustrations. Batoro (one of the elders) is the guy in the game who says "be among the chosen ones" for the record, since i don't think my art of him looks...quite right  
> and batu (who i havent drawn) is the guy who picks up and carries aji at the end of the game
> 
> also, i've got more trico art on my tumblr @faenova hmu if you wanna scream about this game more than just in the comments


	5. it's only change

wake up,

explode.

it's okay,

young god.

it's only change.

 

~

 

A few kids are surprised to see Aji upon waking up. Esi in particular is wary, but Cosu shrieks and tackles him immediately. It makes everyone else loosen up, and the rest of the day almost feels normal. They eat breakfast, the den mother gives them lessons, and they eat lunch. After that, everyone can go to the adults they've been apprenticed to. Mama Hido is still away from the village, so he moves to follow Cosu to the great hall where they usually see Papa Batu. Mama Enta stops them, appearing at the nursery's door with a satchel of what looks like clothes slung over her shoulder. Aji grab's Cosu's hand without thinking, fear spiking through his veins.

"Aji, you're coming with me today. Cosu can go to great hall alone."

Cosu can obviously tell something is wrong. He always knows. He glances between them, looking confused, but gives Aji's hand a reassuring squeeze. "I'll see you later tonight, okay?"

Aji nods, but doesn't say anything. Cosu has to pull his hand away, Aji tries not to cling to it. He doesn't look at Cosu as he walks further into the village. He doesn't look at Mama Enta as she steps closer and puts a hand on his shoulder and leads him down the path to her home just outside the village. "Did you sleep well with the others last night?"

"Yes," he answers.

"The den mother said she heard something outside in the middle of the night and found you running back to the nursery, where you climbed in through a window."

"...I slept well after that."

Mama Enta sighs, but she doesn't slow her walk. "How much did you hear?"

"A lot."

"We spoke more than "a lot," Aji. I just want to know what you heard so I can clear up any misunderstandings."

Aji doesn't dare to hope that it was a misunderstanding. "The elders said I'm a god."

"They do think that," she replies, but doesn't elaborate as the path gets crowded in by trees as they walk farther from the main village.

His skin vibrates as they keep walking, and it isn't long before he blurts out "Am I?"

"What, a god?" This time she slows her pace to look at Aji. "What do you think?"

"I don't want to be," he admits.

"Then you don't have to be."

"Does that mean I can go back to the nursery and be Mama Hido's apprentice again?"

She stops, just short of the clearing where her house is. "No."

"But I don't want--"

"It doesn't matter if you're a god or not. You have magic that you cannot control. I need to teach you how to master it, for your safety and everyone else's."

Mama Enta starts walking again. Aji's feet are stuck where he's standing. "I--" he starts, but the words die on his tongue. Magic vibrates through his bones, just proving her point. "I just wanted everything to go back to normal." He chokes back on tears that he refuses to cry. "I don't like this," he whispers, hoping that it can change her mind. Maybe for a minute she could actually act like his grandma, instead of the healer chief, and tell him that of _course_  he can return to Mama Hido.

"I know, Aji." Her voice is resolved, unwavering. "I don't like this either."

That doesn't make him feel much better, but he unsticks his feet and follows Mama Enta long after she's reached her house. "What will I do as your apprentice?"

"I'll be the one to teach you numbers and writing from now on," she starts. He already knows that. Healer apprentices get removed from the village the moment the healer chief chooses them. He grew up here, in Mama Enta's hut, when his mother was still alive. She wasn't allowed to live in the village as the healer apprentice, so his papa had to leave the village and live there if he wanted to stay with her. "I'll teach you magic. Proper magic, how to heal people and talk with spirits and gods."

He never cared about what Mama Enta was teaching his mama Anase before now. He never liked being so far away from the rest of the village, having to come home to a remote house in the forest. His mama dying was... awful, but the fact that his papa moved them to the village afterwords helped a lot. When he went to the nursery early, he was thrilled. When Mama Hido decided she wanted him to be her apprentice and said he would get to travel with her, he was just over the moon.

Now, back to the healer chief's hut.

Coming home is familiar, comforting, even over all the messy thoughts in Aji's mind.

The house walls feel like a cage as he steps through the doorway.

He buzzes, but doesn't explode. A quiet reminder than he can't go back. "What are we doing today?"

"We'll make up your space and put your things away. After that, you can rest. You've been through a lot." She's already unpacking his clothes from her bag, taken from his space in the nursery's storage. He stays just on the cusp of the doorway, and can't move closer to her again. "Aji."

Aji looks up from the clothes, and to her face. He isn't sure if his expression says anything, because he isn't sure what he's feeling. He just knows he doesn't want to be feeling it. Mama Enta crosses the distance between them and kneels in front of him, so they're eye-level. She puts her hands on his shoulders--gently, not like when she was guiding him here with firm shoves.

"I love you very much, Aji. I know this isn't what you wanted, but I promise it won't be all that bad."

He loves Mama Enta too. He loves her so much, he really does. But his throat goes dry. Probably because it's all being used up by his tears.

Oh. He's crying.

Mama Enta squeezes him, tight and reassuring. Aji loves her.

She apologizes. He knows she means it.

He hates this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i guess,, the unfortunate update schedule is roughly once per month  
> but hey at least im marginally consistent  
> this is the shortest chapter in this fic bc its just transitional, but the next one will be normal length


	6. seasons come

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aji has to meditate now, which is even worse than being separated from the village. He fidgets, gets distracted by his own body and the foreign magic running through it. And if he ever manages to clear his mind like Mama Enta tells him, he tends to fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aji has adhd and so do i which is my only excuse for this taking so long

wake up,

explode.

it’s okay,

young god.

it’s only change.

seasons come

 

~

 

Aji has to meditate now, which is even worse than being separated from the village. He fidgets, gets distracted by his own body and the foreign magic running through it. And if he ever manages to clear his mind like Mama Enta tells him, he tends to fall asleep.

When he isn't supposed to be meditating, which is most of the time thankfully, Mama Enta teaches him about plants. She grows most of her medicinal herbs in fenced off areas, and she shows Aji how to find other ingredients for medicinal use in the forest. She says he doesn't have to memorize them immediately, but he'll start remembering things whether he wants to or not at this rate. He doesn't quite have the hang of grinding things into a fine paste for salves and balms, but he that's still his favorite part of making medicine. His hands don't itch as much when he's sat down with a mortar and pestle and a pile of things to grind.

Mama Enta hasn't had an apprentice since his own mama died, so people have gotten used to having to trek out to her hut to grab anything they need regularly. And it's good they do, because while the healer's apprentice is supposed to run errands for the healer chief, Aji isn't allowed to be by himself in the village until he learns more control.

It scares him, that he can lose control. That means he can't go back to the village unless Mama Enta does, and she doesn't go there often.

He's bored, but he's dangerous. So he's stuck here. Mama Enta says he isn't even allowed to go to the summer solstice festival, though she says she'll stay with with him in solidarity. It doesn't make it much better.

Aji wasn't dangerous back in the Nest, but then his markings were different when he was just with Trico. And after he fought the Master of the Valley, he's felt different. Well. More different than when he first woke up with the markings, at least. Mama Enta thinks he may have taken the magic from the Master of the Valley, when he killed it. It makes sense to him, but he doesn't like it. He doesn't like any of this.

~

Mama Enta keeps her promise, she doesn't go to the main village for the summer solstice festival. She still performs a ritual, something with nasty smelling smoke and throwing things into the fire pit in the yard and a chant that he only half understands. She says it's to thank the sun, and to encourage a healthy harvest. He knows this. But she gets into what exactly each part of the ritual means, and why they use certain elements instead of others, and he holds a bowl of burning herbs and sits at the other side of the fire from her. It feels different, being a part of it, but he isn't sure if he likes it yet.

The summer solstice comes and goes without much fanfare. He can count himself as eleven years old, now.

~

Soft feathers brush against Aji's face as he wakes up, and his eyes snap open.

There's a soft  _ pff  _ against the wooden floor. He turns his head to look, and just finds his blanket. It only fell away from his face.

He yanks it back over his head and curls up underneath it, even though it's light out.

~

Mama Enta gives Aji a blank book, and they use it to record everything they can find out about Aji's new magic. She stays very calm about all of it, treating it like something to study rather than something to be afraid of. He's still scared, but it helps that she doesn't seem to be.

She starts off writing down things they already know--he can move things, and his runes jump off his skin, and his eyes and blood glow with his markings when he's using magic, and he can heal himself to some extent. The other pages stay blank for a good long while, until Aji unthinkingly rolls a boulder over to reach the moss underside it.  _ Strong _ is added to the book in his own handwriting, with an additional paragraph by Mama Enta with how much she thinks the boulder weighed. In the Nest, he never thought about it, but... he could knock over the knights, couldn't he? And he moved around giant iron pots full of the weird smelly glowing stuff that Trico loved without too much effort.

That's something he doesn't mind testing, and it's something he can actually see working in front of him, instead of trying and failing to activate the runes on his skin. Mama Enta says pushing himself to be stronger isn't something he needs to do, but he likes seeing what his limits are. Seeing progress, any kind of progress, written down on paper feels so much better than the blank spaces and question marks previously occupying the pages.

~

Aji can't seem to have normal dreams anymore. They feel heavy and weigh on him, even when he can't remember them. Most of them are nonsense, but he keeps dreaming about the Master of the Valley.

He stands outside the caged orb, staring it down. Daring it to attack him. To try to kill him again. Sometimes he lifts the mirror to shoot it down, or sometimes he walks into it unharmed, but the dreams end the same way.

Runes and markings jump out from the orb at his face, and he startles awake with glowing skin before the first one can ever hit him.

~

The traveling chief from the other village visits the hut before he leaves. Aji learns his name this time--Datri Jahat--but he isn't introduced to the apprentice who stays hidden behind him. All he notices about her is that she's older than him, but not old enough to cover her hair yet. He notices far more about the older man, who keeps staring at Aji's tattoos. He's face is long and he's tall and looming, and he makes Aji want to leave the room and be anywhere but with him. Datri Jahat addresses him exactly once, only managing to say "Acano Aji, do you mind if I take a look at your beautiful markings?" Before Mama Enta blocks him from looking at Aji directly, says something about the medicine he came to get, and tells him to go on his way. The apprentice leaves as quick as possible. Datri Jahat gives Aji one last look before closing the door behind him.

"How a man like him was chosen for traveling chief is beyond me," she grumbles. "The Datri village keeps getting more and more wary of other villages. It won't be long before they sever ties with everyone, mark my words."

Aji does. But he doesn't know what to do with that information, now that he's not the traveling chief’s apprentice anymore. That's not his business to worry about.

He leaves to pick mushrooms that Mama Enta mentioned needing.

~

Aji traces his markings in the hopes that it will give him some kind of insight to what they mean, or how this all works, or...  _ anything _ .

Nothing.

No revelations or sudden bursts of information.

It burns in his mind, knowing that everything is somehow just out of reach, written on his own body, and he doesn't know how to get it back. Everything made sense for just a moment and then it was gone.

He wishes the rest of it would go away too, so he wouldn't have to deal with this.

~

Mama Hido comes back to the village a little while after Datri Jahat leaves. He finds out only when she shows up at the hut, as Aji is in the middle of yanking weeds out of the herb garden. She's got her sunglasses resting on top of her head scarf, but the indents around her eyes where they rest are fresh. She drops to her knees, splatting her already dirty skirts with soil, and raises her arms in an open invitation. Aji doesn't even try to wipe off his hands before he barrels into her chest. Even on her knees, she's so tall and reedy that she nearly has to lean down to touch her chin to his head.

"Aji!" she hugs him so tight that he can't breathe, but he hugs her back just as hard. "Oh, my little Aji, I never thought I'd see you again!"

"Mama Hido--" he chokes on his words and can't get his thoughts out.

"I know. I know, Aji, Batu told me everything. I know. But I had to see you, I had to make sure you're really here." She pulls away, and gently cups his face. Her eyes are watering, and she's trying to smile but she just looks so  _ sad _ . He's never seen her sad like this before, Mama Hido is so cheerful all the time. "Oh, goodness. It really is you. You're okay." She sniffs. "You're gonna be just  _ fine _ , little Aji. Your grandma is gonna teach you amazing things, yeah? You--you're gonna be an amazing healer, you know that? You'll be good no matter what you do."

Aji thought he had accepted his situation, but he cries anyway. Mama Hido cries too, holding him like she's never going to again. At this rate, Aji feels like that may be true. He feels something like burning spark under his skin, but nothing glows. Mama Hido hugs him tight again before she leaves, and he still doesn't glow. Not until it builds up over the next few days, and it explodes when Mama Enta is showing him how to identify plants. She doesn't get hurt, only a few trees and bushes were jostled.

Aji's hands shake on the way back to the hut.

~

He's shattered eight jars in total and damaged most of the books on the shelves when they get thrown off. He didn't entirely uproot any trees when he freaked out in the garden, but now one of them is tilted at a dangerous angle and Mama Enta wants to cut it down for wood before it falls and makes a mess. Aji tries to push it back upright, and he nearly manages it with his new strength. But the height of it makes the tree unwieldy, and he almost gets squished by it. Mama Enta shouts at him to stop, before he  _ really _ gets himself hurt. A carpenter comes over less than an hour later with friends, and they figure out how to safely cut it down so no one gets crushed and it doesn't fall back on Mama Enta's hut. He watches from the window, and waves to one of the uncles who spots him there.

The uncle quickly looks away, and doesn't even spare the window so much as a glance right up until the group leaves with the downed trunk on their shoulders. He risks a quick peek at Aji, and then what seems like... like fear, maybe, crosses his face before he looks dead ahead. Aji slams the window shut before he can see if anyone else looks at him like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> before anyone @s me, sunglasses are old as fuck so yes im giving hido sunglasses


	7. seasons go

wake up,

explode.

it’s okay,

young god.

it’s only change.

seasons come,

seasons go

 

~

 

Aji has nightmares sometimes. That's the only thing that triggers his magic anymore, waking up in a panic because he thinks he's being chased or worse. And he only knocked over a stack of books the last time it happened, nothing as drastic as the tree has happened in a while.

Sometimes, Trico eats him. Her eyes are blown wide and shine pink and he wakes up gasping in an instant. He can usually fall asleep after those dreams. He knows it wasn't her, she would never hurt him. The Master of the Valley is dead, and she's free.

Assuming she's alive.

~

The fall equinox comes and goes, and he can't go to this festival either. Mama Enta doesn't stay with him the whole day this time, but he understands even if he's disappointed. The healer chief can't just stop doing their job after all.

Mama Hido visits briefly. She brings him little rice cakes stuffed with fruit, and hugs him. But she doesn't stay long. She's not allowed to be here, she says. She snuck the cakes out just for him, in case Mama Enta didn't bring him enough goodies back tonight. She hugs him goodbye, and slips out through the forest.

Later that night, he blows the door off its hinges before Mama Enta returns. He cries about it, or maybe about Mama Hido, and apologizes through his tears until his voice is hoarse. Mama Enta isn't mad at him, just props the door up against the frame and says she'll call for the carpenter in the morning.

Aji makes excuses to be in the forest when they come.

~

Other times, Aji's nightmares are about more mundane things. Falling is a big one. He slips or steps onto a surface that isn't there and he falls, and Trico doesn't catch him. He also drowns in his dreams a few times, and once he gets crushed by the falling towers. He wakes up much the same from those dreams as the ones where Trico forgets who he is. 

~

Learning normal magic is less fun than he thought it might be. He hoped it would be more exciting than it always seemed, but no. It's boring. Mama Enta gives him a few small pieces of jewelry that she says will help boost his senses, shows him _sigils_ , and has him sit with her when she ritually contacts spirits. They never have anything interesting to say, it's just weather predictions and who's happy and who they need to appease. She sometimes goes out in the forest and talks to trees, and sometimes all she does is listen. Aji can't feel anything like Mama Enta says she does, but she insists that meditating will let him hear the spirits of nature. All in all it just seems stupid, until it suddenly isn't.

It's not like anything huge happens. In fact, it seems rather normal, when he thinks about it. He had been making bird calls, trying to attract something by imitating all the different calls he can remember. When he stays quiet and hidden, he can sometimes get them to come right up to him, not realizing it's a human in the bush and not another bird. 

He's finally rewarded with a crow landing just out of arm's reach, hopping around in confusion as it searches for the bird that must be grounded and in distress. Aji grins, and calls out again. The crow looks in his direction, screeches, and flies away.

He's stunned for a moment--he's used this patch of underbrush in the past. It's never failed him before, he _knows_ birds can't see him from here. But the crow somehow knew he was there. And it flew off.

If a dumb bird can sense that he's got weird unnatural magic, he should be able to sense something too.

He stays there most of the day, just trying to listen like Mama Enta tells him to. Until he's startled awake by Mama Enta calling his name, and he realizes he must have fallen asleep at some point.

But as he scrambles up and out of the underbrush, he swears he feels... he doesn't know what he feels. Happy, maybe, but he doesn't feel like he's the one who's happy. It's not coming from him or his markings, and it's not anything he's ever experienced before.

Aji won't commit to saying the feeling was coming from the tree he fell asleep under, though it feels right. But when he tells Mama Enta over dinner that he felt something strange today, Mama Enta stops him in his tracks and says "Ah, you finally talked to that tree you always play under?" with such certainty that Aji nearly drops the contents of his flatbread into his lap. "She seemed happy, no wonder."

He doesn't have a response. All he can think about is the tree he felled. It feels like forever ago now, but it must have only been a few weeks or a month or so.

~

The worst nightmares involve the knights catching him. He's got plenty of experience with that for his dreams to draw on. But he doesn't--he shouldn't have any experience beyond that, and yet they stretch out into horrors he can't wake up from. He only ever saw into one of the bright white rooms once, before he kicked the knight's head clean off and ran away. But in his dreams--in his nightmares--he gets taken there. Sometimes other children are with him, lit up in runes and unaware of what's going on.

Aji can't move.

One by one, he and other children are laid out on white slabs. The glow from the runes lifts away from their bodies and into a mist, and flows away from them into empty suits of armor lining the far walls. As the child goes dim, the armor lights up.

The white slabs come to life, swallowing the children whole.

Aji hears the distant whooshing noise of barrels shooting out the top of the tower.

He can only watch.

The runes lift from his skin--he lifts with them, but his body stays behind, and he can't do anything but watch.

Those are the nights where he wakes up screaming, to find that he's glowing and runes leap off his skin haphazardly. He doesn't sleep after those, even after Mama Enta calms him down. She often doesn't sleep either.

~

Mama Enta sings. He forgot she did that. It brings back memories of his own mama singing along with her. Mama Enta says spirits are just as swayed by music as people are, if not more. She says it can be a spell, just like anything can be a spell if you do it right. It makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end sometimes, if they're in the middle of the woods. When Aji expresses his discomfort, Mama Enta laughs.

"Your instincts are getting better. The forest is singing with us."

~

The only thing he ever hesitates to tell Mama Enta about is when he cuts himself. On accident, of course, he trips over the garden fence and catches himself wrong, scraping up his hands on some rocks that are keeping the younger herbs upright. But as soon as he pulls himself up he notices that a little sprout is bent over in the middle. He must have smooshed it under his hand, since he can see a smear of blood on its leaves. Aji quickly tries to right it again, but... it wilts further. In a few moments, it shrivels into an unusable lump.

In a moment of panic, Aji rips the whole sprout out of the ground and holds the dead plant in his hand, staring at its rotten leaves. A part of him wants to throw it back on the ground and bury whatever this is, never look at it again or speak of it to anyone, but a pit forms in his stomach at the thought. He's ready to dismiss it, but Mama Enta has been drilling it into his head that he needs to listen to his instincts if he's going to get anywhere with magic of any kind.

So he stops. He tries to feel the plant as best he can. He hears Mama Enta's suggestions run through his head. What is it telling him? Is it good or bad? What does he need to know?

_It was his fault_.

The inexplicable knowledge that he killed this plant in an instant presses heavy against his chest, but he doesn't know how he did it. He needs to know more.

 _Putting it back will poison the other plants_.

No, the plant is already dead. It can't do anything, right?

But his hands are still bleeding. He can't let his blood touch the dirt--

The thought slams into the front of his mind with such force that he almost drops his little pile of dirt and dead plant. _His blood poisoned the plant_. Aji is frozen a moment, making sure he's steady on his feet. He carefully steps around the rocks and over the fence, slow and calculated. He doesn't even make it to the hut before Mama Enta is asking what on earth he's doing with dirt all the way up to his elbows.

He tries to tell her that he tripped, and he was just about to clean up and that he has something important to say, but what comes out is, "I think I'm poisonous."

His outlandish statements used to be a source of amusement, before he was chosen and taken away. Now Mama Enta looks concerned. "How so?"

Aji holds out his hands. "I tripped and fell, and... bled on it."

She inspects it with a careful eye, but doesn't touch it. "This was healthy before?"

He nods.

"Come inside, I know where we can put that."

Mama Enta holds an empty bowl up where he deposits his pile of dirt. It gets set side for the moment in the house, and she grabs Aji's book before guiding him to the portion of the river that runs just beyond the hut. His hand still bleeds from the shallow cuts when all the dirt is scrubbed away, so he holds it over the river so drops that fall will wash it away in the water.

She plucks a leaf from a bush and brushes it against his open cut. Within moments, the leaf shrivels and turns brown. It doesn't spread to Mama Enta, like he thought it might.

It's when she reaches for his hands with her own bare fingers that he jumps back. "You could get hurt!"

"I cleaned the blood off your face the night of the fire," she says calmly. "I wasn't hurt then. I just want to see."

Aji hesitates. This power could be new--no, it was there before this. He's sure it isn't new. He needs to listen to his instincts. Fear won't help him.

He presents his hands to Mama Enta, and tries not to worry. She washes her hand in the stream and brushes a single thumb over his cut, then stares at the smear of blood.

"Stings a bit," she says calmly, and dips her hand back in the stream to wash the blood away. "But not physically. It felt like your magic was trying to attack me, but didn't have the power to do so. Perhaps the plants are affected so badly because they have weak spirits."

Oh. He can't hurt people with this. Or at least, not Mama Enta. She has the strongest spirit he knows of. That's good. "So, I'm poisonous to plants."

"I doubt it's poison. But your magic runs deep, through your whole body. It may have altered you more than we thought."

"Is that bad?"

"It's different. You're different, not bad. You get to choose what you want to do with it."

"...I want to meditate."

Mama Enta barks a laugh. "Really, now? Are you sure your Trico gave us back the right Aji?"

Aji wrinkles his nose at her joke. "No, I don't really want to," he admits. "But I think I need to."

"Alright. Let me bandage up your hands, and I'll leave you alone until dinner."

~

Aji meditates, but with less reluctance now. He still hates it--well. He dislikes it. He's jittery and uncomfortable on the worst days, but he tries to focus on the feeling he got when he knew his blood was poison, and... maybe a few more things start to make sense after this. Well, not really. But he feels more comfortable with the magic written on his skin. He still can't use his power on command, which is frustrating. But he gets ideas about... how it works? That's what he thinks it might be. He writes down all the ideas. Mostly things he's remembered about each symbol meaning something, and what if he could combine them to do new things? It's all theory until he learns to do it on purpose, but Mama Enta says that understanding it is the first step to using it. Maybe this is what he's been missing.

And when he thinks about it, he hasn't had an accident in almost a month. Not even after a nightmare. That's better, at least. It's some kind of progress.

~

Trico shows up often in his dreams, more than anything else he's dreamed about in his whole life. But lately she isn't eating him, or dropping him, or anything bad. The nightmares start to become less frequent, but only because they never get to finish. The beginnings of familiar nightmares start to play out as he sleeps, but Trico will show up in the middle of it and disrupt whatever horrible thing is going to happen. He can climb up onto her back and fly, or visit other tricos freed from the Master of the Valley, or explore more of the Nest. He can feel her again, he can be with her.

He still wakes up with tears on his face sometimes, after those dreams. But he stays quiet. It's hard to remember them, and he gets left with a fleeting memory of wind or feathers or her gentle crooning. He starts writing down his dreams about her in the book. Mama Enta doesn't comment on it, only says he should write his other dreams down too. She says dreams are important, and they might help Aji unlock his markings.

The hair on the back of Aji's neck stands up, and he knows she's right.

But he's afraid of what will happen once he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im gonna do my damndest to update again before december ends. maybe as a crimbas gift
> 
> im gonna start changing up the outfits periodically because aji needs long sleeves for winter clothes, and also hes a growing boy. soon enough he wont fit in the clothes he wore in the game!


	8. and come again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im pretty sure this is the longest chapter, so merry crimbas heres a Lot of content. only one more chapter to go and then we move on to the second story in the series aaaAAA

wake up,

explode.

it’s okay,

young god.

it’s only change.

seasons come,

seasons go,

and come again

 

~

 

The weather turns colder and leaves a strange new sensation on Aji's buzzing skin. The winter solstice is fast approaching, and he counts down the days until the festival. He can't use his magic on purpose yet, but Mama Enta says if he doesn't have another incident before the solstice, then he can come with her this time. He won't be allowed to run off by himself, but it's better than being stuck at the hut again.

Aji helps Mama Enta gather things for the ritual. She makes him go through ingredients and tell her what each of them means and what they're for. He can remember what most things are for, but he's still bad at remembering the names of all the plants and tools.

She tells him that they won't stay for long, just to complete the rituals needed and observe for a while so she isn't missed at the festival. Aji doesn't care, he'll take anything at this point.

He tries not to look at the other villagers, because he doesn't want to see them staring. But what he finds instead is more of the same that he experienced with the carpenters. No one wants to look at him.

The night blurs together, but not in a terrifying way like the last time he was in the village square. He's just kinda bored. He stands dutifully next to Mama Enta and hands her tools, or holds things, or says something when prompted. His eyes are on the fire, the glow and the flickering that seems to make his markings buzz in time with the beat of the flames. It's calming--and before he knows it, it's over.

Mama Hido comes to sit next to them, after the solstice ritual. She tells him it will take years to find an apprentice as good as Aji, which makes him smile. Papa Batu comes near, but he apparently decides not to say anything after simply nodding at Aji. That sours his good mood right up.

Mama Enta says they should leave.

He doesn't see Cosu anywhere.

~

In Aji's dreams, Trico smashes the knights and picks him up by the scruff of his shirt. She carries him through the ruins like that, winding through passages he isn't sure exist, but make perfect sense in this blurry dream world. She sets him down and the ground shifts, becoming the cave he and Trico were first trapped in. The ground is cold and slushy from melted ice and snow, but it looks relatively the same as last he remembers it.

Nothing extraordinary happens, which is how these dreams usually go. He climbs up Trico's leg and lays down in the space between her wings, feathers held tight in his fists and his face buried in the fluff. He stays there for a while, just feeling her breathe. Feathers ruffle around him as her chest rises and falls, and he wakes up with dry eyes and fading tear stains on his pillow.

It's hard to pick himself up out of bed, though he doesn't feel tired.

~

He still can't go anywhere by himself, but Mama Enta makes purposeful trips to the village so he can come with her. "I'm showing you the ropes," she explains, because she's confident that he'll be doing normal apprentice duties soon enough. Delivering medicine and checking around the village for negative spirits hanging around that they need to take care of, and other things of the like. She shows him where they're most likely to appear, and tells him how to watch for things that get attached to people, how to catch it early before it destroys them from the inside out.

Aji looks for Cosu, but he can never find him before Mama Enta says they need to return to the healer's hut.

~

He dreams about the Master of the Valley more often. Trico doesn't rescue him from these dreams, he just keeps waking himself up before he can find out what happens next.

The dreams get written down with all the others. He's started keeping tally marks next to some of them, since it's just the same thing repeated night after night.

There are four separate entries on the dream of the Master of the valley. And there are sixteen tally marks next to the last entry, when he decided to stop writing duplicate entries. He purposely doesn't leave a space to write down the ending of the dream. He doesn't want to know yet.

~

The spring equinox closes in. It's only the day before the festival when Mama Enta tells Aji that he can wander by himself, so long as he doesn't get into too much trouble. Another incident, and he'll go straight back to the hut for another year. But he hasn't destroyed anything in months, the most that's happened is his body glowing after the rare nightmares when the Trico in his dreams can't save him. He woke up with his blanket on the other side of the room, once. He doesn't tell Mama Enta about it, but it can't hurt. It was only one time, after all.

No entries in his book about exploding or destroying things is progress. Visible progress. He feels good each time he re-shelves his fast filling book.

~

The festival itself is uneventful. Aji ignores the villagers who stare, or very pointedly _don't_ stare, and focuses everything on helping Mama Enta greet the world as it wakes up from winter. Two girls turn sixteen this festival, and Mama Enta marks their face with paint that Aji mixed himself and declares them adults. He doesn't know their names, they left the nursery by the time he was there even though he joined early. He doesn't even know what job either of them does. And maybe he stares a little too hard at them, from Mama Enta's side. They look uncomfortable, but Mama Enta of course has to make it worse before they leave.

"Do you have something to say to the girls, Aji?"

His mind goes blank. Does he? He usually just opens his mouth and then whatever happens, happens. He could also just say no, and not embarrass himself. "I don't know them." Or he could just open his mouth and have that tumble out. That works too. "But--" but what? "You seem... nice." Never mind, that doesn't work at all. "Enjoy the festival!" He adds on as an afterthought.

He wants to crawl under a rock and sleep until summer.

The girls, however, go wide-eyed at his comment. The one on the left thanks him, and they both give quick bows to Mama Enta. And then to _Aji_ , before running back to their friends and family.

Mama Enta looks smug. "Cat got your tongue?"

"That was mean!" Aji hisses.

"You love me. Now come on, you're going to throw the herbs into the fire."

~

Aji's book is covered in drawings, shoved in the margins of the text and sometimes overlapping entries he doesn't think are that important. It started because he was trying to visualize the way Trico's eyes lit up, but it turned into drawings of plants and trees and even Mama Enta once or twice when she's focused on a task and still enough to draw. They aren't very good, but Mama Enta compliments him and asks if he wants a different book to draw in so he has more room to write important things down. He says this is fine, since he's only doodling in the margins anyway. It's not that important.

She insists on getting him a book to separate the drawings from the text anyway, and soon enough she takes Aji to the village to get more blank paper. A whole book to himself, just for drawing... he's afraid to ruin it.

He ends up putting Trico on the very first page, big enough to cover the whole paper.

~

Mama Enta tells him early in the morning that she thinks he's fine to go back to the village by himself. The first time Aji returns to the village unsupervised, he heads straight for his papa's house. Papa Macata isn't home, but his sister is. She greets him with an enthusiasm that Aji missed dearly, almost bowling him over as she leaps into his arms for a hug. Dimi rambles about her day, about bugs and her friends and their papa and all sorts of things that he used to brush off as boring. He's absolutely enthralled, taking in every detail of her normal life that he wishes he could have back.

Until, of course, she turns it on him. What has he been doing? How was his day? How is Mama Enta? Is he learning magic? Can he show her? Can he talk to ghosts yet?

"Not yet," he admits. "I'm still learning how to do magic."

"Awh." She pouts, and goes quiet for once. "I wanted to see magic."

"I'm sorry. I'll show you someday, promise." He pulls her closer, and remembers another promise he made that he never got to make good on. "Do you want to hear how I got my tattoos instead?"

Dimi's face lights up. _"Yes."_

He doesn't tell her everything, of course. But he thinks she's fine to hear the general story, that Trico gobbled him up and spat him out ("She tried to _eat_ you? _Eww, gross!_ ") and that he woke up with strange magic tattoos, and he had to befriend Trico to escape the Nest. She hangs on every word of his watered down story, until their papa comes home and her attention is diverted. She shrieks his name and runs over to hug their papa much in the same way she hugged Aji just earlier. Doesn't matter if you've been gone five minutes or five months, Aji thinks. Dimi is always happy to see you.

Aji hears his name as Dimi launches into an excited explanation about how he'd been telling her stories for the past hour. Papa Macata looks surprised to see Aji, but welcomes him with a hug nonetheless.

He asks many of the same things Dimi did, just... more polite. How are his studies? How is Mama Enta? Is he doing okay as her new apprentice?

It's... stilted. His papa isn't unkind. He just doesn't seem to know what to do about Aji's situation, and Aji doesn't know if he can blame him. He doesn't know what he would do either, if he were in Papa Macata's position. He barely knows what to do now.

"I'm proud of you," he says before Aji leaves. "Stay safe, and visit soon."

The last bit is almost drowned out by Dimi shouting her own goodbye, but he hears it well enough. "I will."

It isn't until halfway back to the healer's hut that he realizes that his papa probably could have visited him, if he wanted to. Mama Hido did. But he waited until Aji came over, instead.

He doesn't have the energy to think about it. He just keeps walking to drown out the buzzing in his veins.

~

It's still cold long after the spring equinox. Winter overstayed its welcome, but when it leaves it's almost overwhelming to wake up to the sense that things are _awake_ again. It's hardly anything more than a faint feeling, just about unnoticeable underneath the natural buzz of his skin, but it's there. And the fact that Aji can identify it is a shock.

"You and Anase both were born with natural talent. Our family is inclined to it," Mama Enta tells Aji over preparing a meal. "I guessed that you would start to really feel the spirits with a few years of practice, much like your mama. It hasn't been half that long, but you've already learned a lot."

"It doesn't feel like it."

"That's because you keep comparing yourself to what you know of me. But what you can already do is incredible."

Aji pauses in chopping vegetables to stare at the back of his marked hands. "I think my markings make me more sensitive." Aji doesn't look up at her, just goes back to chopping. "I feel like I can connect to things... through them. Even when they're not glowing."

"That would make sense." She sets some kind of root in front of him. He forgets what it's called. He's only seen this get thrown in the fire--he didn't think it was also for eating. "Peel this for me. Have you written these things down?"

"Not yet. I just thought of it now."

"Your first instincts are usually right," Mama Enta reminds him.

"I know."

~

Since he can go to the village on his own now, and he's finally been able to confirm his worst fears. Cosu is avoiding him.

Aji went to the village to find Cosu so they could goof off (with permission, of course) but when he couldn't find Cosu at the nursery, he went to Papa Batu, who guarded himself in an instant, putting on an air of... something. He goes stone-faced and professional, like when he talks to traveling chiefs from other villages. "Cosu is probably back at the nursery. Have you checked there?"

Aji says he has, and thanks him anyway. He squints at Papa Batu for a moment, but he can't place what's wrong. So he leaves, and doesn't find Cosu that day.

He doesn't find Cosu the next two times either. Once, he sees Cosu out of the corner of his eye, but he's gone just as Aji calls out his name.

He thought maybe, at the spring equinox... maybe he was busy. Maybe Papa Batu needed him to do some new thing. All the chiefs have important jobs at festivals, right? But this isn't a coincidence.

He brings it up with Mama Enta, when she's teaching him how to stitch spells into clothes. (He complained about this at first, as he kept stabbing himself with the needle. But with a thimble and some newfound patience from meditating it's not that bad. His spells still look ugly, but they're functional at least.)

"Cosu is scared, that's all." She says it like it's obvious. "It's not every day that gods walk among people."

Aji thinks of his papa, and quickly shoves the thought aside. At least Dimi still treats him like a person. "I'm still me."

"People don't see you enough to know that," Mama Enta reminds him.

"And whose fault is--?" Aji stops himself from finishing that. It tumbled out of his mouth without thinking.

"It's fine, Aji. You have a right to be mad."

Does he, though?

She looks up at him from belt she's embroidering. "Whatever silly thing you're thinking, stop it. I know it hasn't been easy, but consider that you can be around people now without blowing up. You're safe to be around again, because you took a step back to help yourself."

That... makes sense, he supposes. "But now everyone is afraid of me."

"They're afraid because you're different. People fear what's different. Healer chiefs are often feared, to some extent, because of our magic. Now you have magic tenfold to what a normal healer chief has."

Aji grumbles and sticks his face farther into the bracelet he's sewing.

"You'll poke your eyes out if you look that close."

He sits up a little bit straighter. Just a bit.

~

He doesn't see Dimi often, because he still doesn't go into the village often. But he makes a point to visit her when he has free time. He says hi to his papa if he's home, but his real goal is to get her out of the village. 

Aji takes her into the forest and shows her his sketchbook, filled with Trico and plants and animals and Mama Enta. He scribbles a tiny stick figure next to one of the full body pictures of Trico when she asks how big Trico is, and Dimi is suitably impressed. He gives her the pencil, and she draws a series of herself and Aji playing in the forest. Then, on another page, she draws him flying on Trico. Or, her best interpretation of Trico based on his own less than accurate sketches from memory.

Aji helps her climb trees, letting her ride on his back while he gets them up to the lowest branches and putting her up high on branches that he makes sure are stable. He can pick her up with one hand now, and he could carry her all the way to the top of a tree if he wanted to. But he doesn't let her go too high, and he always sticks close in case she slips. She only did once, and he caught her before she even really left the branch completely, but he won't take any chances. He just wants Dimi to have a good time.

"Papa says you might stop visiting someday," Dimi tells him one day when he's holding her hand to help her leap across a stream. "He says you've got more important stuff to do than play with me."

"Then Papa Macata is stupid." It tumbles out before he can think about it, the words bitter on his tongue and leaving regret in the back of his mouth. Oh. Dimi giggles, and he tries to focus on that instead. "That wasn’t a nice thing to say. I didn't mean it."

"It's okay, it was funny."

"No, it's--" he stops himself. She'll argue for hours if he even tries to counter. "The adults think I'm someone really important now. But I'll never stop visiting you, cause you're important to _me_."

Aji won't lose his sister, not like he may have already lost Cosu.

~

Sometimes he _is_ Trico, and he doesn't know what to make of that. He feels powerful, dreaming as a great winged beast. His dreams just seem to get more and more obscure, while still being mundane and somehow calming. It's like an ache he didn't even realize was in his chest melts away when he feels Trico's feathers under his fingers, or feels wings on his back.

He's Trico for a while, until suddenly he isn't, and he's riding on top of her, not even bothering to keep hold of her feathers because he knows he won't fall. He doesn't get a chance to see where in the Nest they are before she leaps into the air, through the tower, and they're back in the Master of the Valley's room. Aji lets himself drop from her back and stands in the presence of the orb, shoulders squared and chin held high.

Everyone else is afraid of him. The Master of the Valley should be too. It can't do anything to him, he's already killed it once. He'll do it again.

Trico is forgotten, and she may be gone, but he doesn't turn back to check. He marches up to the cage and rips it open with his bare hands. It attacks--runes flying towards his face, hitting him with a force he can't describe.

He refuses to wake up.

The orb yields under his touch, bursting into a thousand runes and bright lights.

Aji wakes up glowing, but nothing feels uncomfortable, and nothing is being flung across the room like it usually does when he wakes up like this.

A part of him is surprised, but another part of him... isn't. This makes sense. He tries to quiet down the glow on his skin with a few deep breaths, to bury the magic back in his bones. It isn't needed now.

It listens to him. The room goes dark, and he feels fine.

Is it really that easy?

He reaches for it again, pulling on the feeling. His vision washes over blue, turning the dark room into something easier to see, and his skin has a faint glow again. Not as much as when he would panic before, just enough to be noticeable. Like it's just on the sidelines, waiting to be used.

He closes his eyes and tries to see if he can get meanings out of his markings... but it still just escapes his grasp. So it's _not_ that easy after all.

But still, this is progress. He finally, _finally_ feels like he's accomplished something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its always Really Hard to emulate how kids draw so i went back to my old sketchbooks from when i was 10~12 and tried to copy what those drawings looked like for ajis art
> 
> also i keep drawing the trees different than they are in the game whoop s


End file.
